Stormhoek: Wine for the Rest of Us

I had beers a couple of nights back with Stormhoek’s Jason Korman. At first it seemed a little strange having beers with a winery owner, but on reflection it seems to me that it was entirely appropriate.

Jason is a marketing guy and much of our talk had to do with how most vineyards position their product and how different it is to the approach he’s taking with Stormhoek.

Typical wine marketing creates a perspective of elegance, sophistication and romance. A fashionably coiffed couple will clink crystal stemware as Vivaldi lufts in the background. The way it is positioned on the retail shelf portrays an even more elite image.  An authoritative old world gentleman swirls as glass, sniffs and sips.  As the liquid coats his tongue, he stares heavenwards and utters a number and that double digit rating will determine the product’s shelf position.

Jason has a word for that sort of stuff: “Bullshit.”

He told me the cost of making a premium branded wine bottle and a mass produced one is about equal. The difference is in how one is marketed over the other and whether the producer is going for high volume or price. Actually, I thing supply and demand have a great deal to do with it as well, but his point remains the same.

By contrast, beer is often marketed by depicting groups of friends having fun during special times—at beaches, in balls parks, Cheers-like taverns or backyard barbecues. If there’s background music it’s retro rock.

Jason wants Stormhoek to be the wine for the rest of us, for everyday people enjoying good times with people they care about.  He wants Stormhoek to be your beverage of choice at your next special event and as such he’s making Stormhoek a successful case study for how you can use social media and word of mouth to globally popularize a mass merchandising product.

In the last year, Stormhoek sold over 100,000 cases of wine in Europe and made serious inroads in the United States. This is not huge, but it is impressive when you realize that the product is being marketed just about exclusively through blogging and social networking. I’ll wager the company never places an ad in the industry’s luminary publication, Wine Spectator, but then again, the Stormhoek customer is more likely to be reading user generated content onscreen than top-down pontifications on slick pages.

A significant portion of this success is to Jason’s marketing partnership with Hugh McLeod whose off-center humor and marketing brilliance have been well-in-play. Hugh has pushed it through Gaping Void as well as the Stormhoek blog.  His edgy cartoons that will soon become Stormhoek labels (e.g. “Drink Stormhoek or the puppy gets it,”) Hugh is one of blogging’s most popular players.  I have heard him called many things.  No one has ever called him elite.

Nor would you describe Jason that way and both of them would be proud of it. Jason and Hugh are pushing a highly enjoyable 10-buck-a-bottle wine and their customer is simply not the black tie set.  They’d much rather project an image closer to the beer industry: Stormhoek is something to be shared with friends during good times.

To achieve this, they recently started sponsoring 100 Stormhoek events to be held on 100 consecutive nights.  It has generated incredible word-of-mouth with very diverse groups. One night in Cork, Ireland, Stormhoek was being poured at a blogger dinner where you would have expected to see Guinness. A few weeks later, it was the being poured at a cast party to bid farewell to a soon-to-be former Donald Trump apprentice. (Donald apparently couldn’t make it). 

This creates a possibility for both of us.  If you a “something special” event coming up you should email either Jason or Hugh see if you can talk them into sending you a few free cases. Tell them Shel sent you. If your event is in the Bay Area, and you score the wine, invite me.  It’s the least you can do to reward me for getting you all that free wine.

I like their wine.  I like them and I like their story even better. When an entire product category falls into imitating each other it makes a great opportunity for someone new to come along and turn them upside down.

Comments

[Andrew]

I explored the possibility of getting some Stormhoek for the Boston blogger dinner in your honor... but it was cancelled :(